AdAlta collaborates with Crossbeta to find i-body for Alzheimer’s disease

Today, Crossbeta Biosciences and AdAlta announced that they have established a collaborative relationship in which AdAlta will deploy its i-body technology to develop oligomer-specific i-bodies for therapeutic and diagnostic applications in Alzheimer’s disease using Crossbeta’s stabilized beta-amyloid oligomers.

Alzheimer’s disease is the most common form of dementia, primarily affecting people above the age of 60. Over 26 million people are suffering from Alzheimer’s disease today, a number that is projected to triple over the coming 40 years. Alzheimer’s disease remains to be an area of great unmet need with huge and growing social and economic impact. Beta-amyloid oligomers are implicated in Alzheimer’s disease pathology and there is no effective treatment yet.

AdAlta’s innovative i-body technology represents the next generation of biological therapeutics merging the highly selective specificity of antibodies with the advantages of drug-like molecules, such as small size and extreme stability. This combination provides AdAlta’s i-bodies with unique favourable properties for their application as therapeutic as well as for diagnostic purposes.

Crossbeta’s oligomer-stabilizing technology generates robust, well-defined oligomers, thus solving the problems related to the elusive nature of oligomer preparations. The stabilized oligomers can be purified to remove monomers and fibrils. The resulting homogeneous oligomers are stable while their pathological functionality is maintained, making them highly suitable tools for the discovery and development of disease-modifying drugs.

“Crossbeta’s novel approach provides an alternative for the identification and development of i-bodies for Alzheimer’s disease”, commented AdAlta’s CEO, Samantha Cobb.

Guus Scheefhals, CEO of Crossbeta Biosciences, added: “AdAlta’s i-body technology offers an exciting novel opportunity for Alzheimer drug development. We are very pleased to be working with AdAlta and applying the Crossbeta oligomer technology to identify novel treatments and diagnostics for Alzheimer’s disease.

About Crossbeta Biosciences:

Crossbeta Biosciences is a biotech company owning a proprietary technology platform for efficient oligomer-based drug discovery with applications in Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, Huntington’s disease and other misfolded protein diseases. The Crossbeta technology enables the generation of well-defined stable, soluble and pathologically functional oligomers. These stable oligomers allow for Crossbeta to develop robust assays enabling fast, efficient and de-risked compound library screening for the discovery of drug candidates. The platform can identify hit compounds that have the ability to reduce oligomer toxicity either by specifically interacting with the oligomers or by inhibition of particular receptors implicated in mediating oligomer toxicity. Crossbeta has demonstrated the unique capabilities of its technology platform with beta amyloid oligomers which play an important role in Alzheimer’s disease. Crossbeta has successfully identified several compounds that inhibit the toxicity of these oligomers.

Crossbeta Biosciences is open to research collaborations and early partnerships; Crossbeta, furthermore, provides services based on its proprietary technology to develop new oligomer targets and related screening assays.

About AdAlta Pty Ltd:

AdAlta is pioneering a new technology that uses the human equivalent of the shark antibody, known as the i-body that can be used as therapeutic interventions in disease, offering a new and more effective approach to a wide range of human diseases. The novel i-body libraries can be screened in the lab against a disease target to identify a therapeutic lead candidate. I-bodies show high target specificity and high affinity for their target. The i-bodies are stable at high temperatures and low pH and can be manufactured in bacterial systems. In addition to the stability, the i-body has a long binding loop that human antibodies and other next generation antibodies do not have. The i-body with this long binding loop can target sites that traditionally antibodies can’t, such as clefts in cell surface receptors or the active sites of enzymes or targets such as GPCRs and ion channel targets.